Independent Third Party Assurance Report

Independent Third Party Assurance Report

Prior to writing this independent third party assurance report on "Environmental Report 2005", I was granted the opportunity to meet President Ono and the members who put this report together, with that in mind, I will express my opinion on this report.

This report is the 2nd issue following the previous year's fist issue, the page number has remained constant, however the quality of the content and the material has dramatically improved. Through this issue of Tamron's environmental report, I could feel the effort and the time spent on putting it together. It clearly reflected President Ono's vision to, "promote an active stance of a transparent corporation", "to have an in-house regulation standard that is higher than current laws and regulation", and "to unify the regulations in both domestic and overseas sites".

The core elements of an environmental report are environmental goals, actual results, self evaluation, and setting following year's goals, if all four of these elements are present in the report, it is safe to conclude that PDCA is functioning effectively. In the pervious report few points were left ambiguous, however this year's report is organized in an orderly manner. Another important factor to look at is how this years report evaluates the factory in China with the same standard as the factories in Japan, this is important when considering the increased production capabilities in China. In addition, within the 40 set goals there were 5 unachieved goals, yet the clearly laid out plan to overcome the problem is to be highly praised.

Each section of the environmental report explains the activities in detail, making it easy for the reader to visualize the activities. Although such level of content development can be highly evaluated, the grounds for environment reports are expanding as well. Publishing information regarding environmental activity is vital to reduce the burden on the environment. Current information provided in the repot regarding industrial waste produced at Tamron is only volume levels, in the future a more thorough pictorial of waste management chart and the level of waste at each stage may be something to consider. I hope to see a flow chart as visual-aid for understanding of the process in the following issues of this report and further promotion of recycling and continuous challenge towards zero emission operation.

From this edition of the environmental report, environmental accounting has been introduced and from the results, the movement of increased investment to reduce environmental load has been promoted at Tamron. We believe that it is a great movement toward a better environmental management as an organization. In the future, I hope to see a much more in-depth analysis and an enhanced environmental management system.

As President Ono indicated, the CSR is becoming increasingly important. Society is keeping a close eye on the development of Tamron, as it has doubled the number of employees and sales in the past three years. With the focus on CSR there are increased numbers of articles and entries regarding CSR in the environmental reports. In this report there are mentions of human resource and work environment related topics, however it lacks detail and the section on qualitative analysis has room for improvement. In the next environmental report, I hope to see environmental information at the core, expanding into triple bottom line reporting.

The Valdez Society:
Established in 1991, the institute promotes CSR to corporations and social responsibility to stakeholders and environmentally friendly perspective to consumers. It is the only organization in Japan that is a certified member of the CERES.